Samsung Increases Customer Satisfaction and Streamlines the Resolution Journey with Yext Help Site Search

Samsung is a household name and one of the world's largest electronics companies. Providing exceptional service to its millions of customers is paramount, and the business regularly seeks to adopt innovative ways of improving the support experience. Like many companies, one of Samsung's most effective customer support channels has been its Help Site. For five years, Scott Messina, Director of Search and Design Strategy, has been improving and optimizing the Help Site to better serve users looking for answers. "There's a support side to samsung.com, and I basically manage that end-to-end," says Messina. "My responsibilities include things like SEO, product management, design, analytics, and content strategy."

Soon after March 2020, traffic to Samsung's website exploded. With more people working from home, the usage of cell phones, TVs, and kitchen appliances spiked across the board. Messina and his team were generally prepared for the accompanying surge in search volume to the Samsung help site. However, their legacy search solution, Elasticsearch, was unpredictable and didn't always yield relevant results. "The reality is that sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't. Sometimes there was a bad experience waiting at the end for someone who searched," he says.

Management of the Samsung help site was the responsibility of Messina and one full-time engineer. They were strapped for bandwidth, and the relative complexity of Elasticsearch proved difficult for such a small team. "We needed engineers to make even the most basic edits. It just wasn't sustainable," says Messina.

Without the availability of a dedicated services component from Elasticsearch, Messina's group was forced to become entirely self-sufficient. They soon recognized the need for a new search provider if they were to make any meaningful improvements to Samsung's online support experience. What they needed was an advanced, yet intuitive tool that came with a team ready to assist with implementation and continuous optimization.

Samsung ultimately decided to transform its help site with Yext's support solutions. Messina's team, led by his colleague, Jio Duperoy, used the expansive Data Connector framework to quickly develop a robust CMS with articles, FAQs, YouTube videos, and more. "We have roughly 2,500 help articles, and that's the main thing we wanted to have indexed. We've been optimizing this content library for years, so it was great that we could just flip a switch and be ready to go," says Messina. "Switching over to Yext, not just for search but also for knowledge management, has freed us from all of the baggage and tech debt that we had built up over the years with Elasticsearch."

Yext's unique multi-algorithm approach piqued Messina's interest when Samsung was evaluating new vendors. Specifically, he was impressed that Yext technology could create a Google-like search experience. "I first saw featured snippets in action on Google and have been interested in them as a concept ever since. What Yext is doing with Extractive QA is the exact same thing," says Messina. "On samsung.com, I can now search 'what temperature should my fridge be?' and the answer isn't a document or a few paragraphs — it's literally a number. Similarly, searching 'how often should I replace the water filter in my fridge?' gives a direct result. Extractive QA finds the right answers within our [Yext Content] and surfaces them without any additional work on our end."

With search analytics ready right out of the box, Samsung can easily monitor performance. These findings have already influenced certain aspects of Samsung's content strategy. "The data from Yext is highlighting where we have gaps," says Messina. "It's really helpful that Yext clusters related queries together like 'replace my remote' and 'can't find my remote.' Historically, it's been a manual effort to lump all of these queries together, but now it's done automatically. Yext can cluster dozens of queries together that all have the same meaning, which makes it easy to identify where we can improve."

Messina now has the ability to independently test and optimize CTAs without relying on a team of engineers. This flexibility allows Samsung to improve and adapt in real time to customer behavior — something that becomes even more important as Messina looks ahead to busy times like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. "We want to continue optimizing and increasing clickthrough rates to set ourselves up nicely for the surge in search volume that comes during the holiday season," says Messina. "If someone searches for an answer, gets it, and is then on their way, that's one happier customer who doesn't have to deal with a phone call."

Although his team has since grown beyond just one full-time engineer, Messina has been grateful to have Jio's dedicated attention and Yext's Managed Services offering available as a continued resource. "With Yext, we have access to subject matter experts and a team that very much feels like an extension of our own," says Messina. "The Yext team was incredibly helpful in getting us up and running and I know that they'll continue to play a big role moving forward."

Within eleven weeks of launching Yext's support solutions, Samsung saw significant growth in every major customer satisfaction metric across NPS score (+45%), CSAT (+33%), Issues Resolved (+15%), and surveys completed (8x+). With Yext, Messina's team got unparalleled insights into searches and CTA performance and used those insights to boost CTR on those CTAs by 40%. Promoted help articles and other pieces of content saw over a 200% lift in CTR.

All told, Samsung increased customer engagement with its help site by 19% — streamlining the path to resolution and delighting customers along the way.

"Before Yext, search on samsung.com was pretty typical relative to what other companies were doing. There was a magnifying glass at the top of the page, but its job was to sell phones, TVs, and fridges — its job was not to answer questions," says Messina. "But now, we've gone live with Yext's support solutions and it's doing what it needs to do. Our KPIs are moving in the right direction and we already have our eyes on other Yext solutions to further enhance the Samsung support experience."